Public opinion surveys

The Government’s Best Value initiative requires councils to consult residents and interested parties on their performance and proposed plans. This is a perfect example of a “public opinion” survey.

There are several ways to obtain insight into Public Opinion or delivery of local services. The main ones are shown below (with brief explanation/comment):

Qualitative

Focus groups (see qualitative summary on page 19)

Citizen’s Jury (12-16 members of public who deliberate on evidence about a specific topic before reporting their conclusion/recommendation; some members may have specialist knowledge; jurors are usually only selected once)

Public Meetings (tend to be quite formal; lack the level of interactivity that can be achieved through a more focused qualitative survey)

Quantitative

Resident surveys (by telephone or in-person; usually large scale and representative)

Citizen’s Panel (representative panel, usually of 1000-4000 local residents, who are contacted regularly to give views on a range of local issues; used increasingly often)

Qualitative or quantitative

User surveys and discussion groups (to ensure that real life experiences are understood)

Interest surveys and discussion groups (to ensure that special interest and lobbying groups have an opportunity to express their views/opinions in open forum)

If the aim is to assess the range of issues at play then a broad-based qualitative approach is usually called for. However, if the aim is to assess actual performance, then a quantitative survey is normally required. Extreme care is needed to ensure that the overall sample is fully-representative, and that sufficient numbers of minority/ethnic group respondents are included to obtain statistically valid reading on these important sub groups.

A fully-representative citizen’s panel or resident survey is usually ensured by setting strict recruitment quotas by individual local government “ward”, based on each ward’s known ethnic/age/class profile.

One of the key challenges is to ensure that representative public opinion surveys are not methodologically biased by interested parties or pressure groups. For instance, the way a survey question is drafted can fundamentally affect the answer given. Government referenda are good examples of this fact!